Tag: Architect

In a typical agile environment, as there is no specific design phase, and there are often questions about when the design and architecture happens. There is continuous evolution of architecture and design that happens during the sprint and iterations. Also the conventional roles like Managers and Architects have no room in an agile environment. In this article we will discuss who do we call an Architect in an agile environment and what are their characteristics.

Agile Architect

An agile architect is a developer working and taking the most important technical decisions on the product. This is generally a person who has deep knowledge of the product and the technologies used and have great ownership in taking it to the next level. This definition beats the conventional definitions of a software architect who generally creates artifacts (like class diagram, sequence diagram etc) to be consumed by developers. An agile architect also do these conventional things in order to empower other developers, but also leads & helps the team to solve daily problems faced to implement the technical direction.

Characteristics

Be Agile: Agile architects are highly flexible and adaptable to changing requirements and environments and always open to changes.

Right tool for the problem : Agile architects often have good knowledge on more than one development language and are always open to newer technologies and solutions. When they are solving an intense problem, they use the right tool to solve that.

Emergent Design: Agile architects know that we can not fix the architecture at one go while the requirements keeps changing. So they are always ready to change the architecture and design based on the current business requirements.

Always Learning: They know there is always a better way to do thing and are open to do changes to their current tools, techniques and processes.

Refactor it in free time: When code does not reach perfection, they are open to achieve the business results and then do code refactoring to fix the flaws.

TDD/BDD: Agile architects always follow best practices like TDD/BDD so that the code is always nimble to new architectural changes.

Team along: As architecture and design is in the hands of every developer, agile architects always bring the team along and continuously get their inputs and provide technical directions.

Respect: There is no ivory tower for an agile architect, they are always part of the team and delivering results. So they respect other team members opinions and ideas and focus on delivering the best results for the product.

In this ever changing business environment, developers are often asked to deliver more and more in less time. Agile architects are a big asset to a team in providing technical, architectural and design guidance to the team.